On Tuesday 08 of July 2014 16:18:07 timothy.m.butterworth@gmail.com wrote:
3.12.x has been out for quite a while it is not exactly cutting edge, and has had a number of maintenance patches applied to it so I see no real issue in migrating openSUSE updates to it. I do not know any user that would be unhappy about this.
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All software has defects, regressions happen, keeping old software does not really help in any way as far as I am concerned. Most regressions are found and corrected quickly. Most users are happy when they get new features which generates the best form of positive marketing.
From the maintainability point of view, it makes sense to move to kernel
No, they are not. For most users, it's more like in this strip: https://www.eviscerati.org/comics/comic/kp/2005/05/cold-hard-truth If the distribution doesn't work on some hardware from the start or if the user is missing some new feature, it makes sense for him/her to try newer version from OBS or try Tumbleweed or even Factory. Most users, however, have already installed and working systems and would be very annoyed if they just updated the system and it stopped working. And be sure that if we just throwed in a 3.14 or 3.15 kernel, this would happen and people would be very unhappy. When we moved from 2.6.37 to SLE-based 3.0 kernel in Evergreen 11.4 for very good reasons, there were people who complained because things stopped working for them (and not all of them because of missing NVidia/fglrx drivers). based either on Canonical's 3.11.10.z or on stable 3.12.y or on SLE12. All these have their pros and cons and I would welcome a discussion about which of these three would be the most suitable (taking Evergreen into account). But I don't see much advantage in moving to 3.14.y instead; while it would help some new installation, it would also unnecessarily heighten the risk of regressions and breaking existing systems.
openSUSE is not an Enterprise targeted distro, it is a community targeted distro sitting in the middle between Enterprise and bleeding edge, it would be nice to push it a little further toward bleeding edge and a little less toward enterprise and start regularly bumping core components up after they have been released for general consumption for 3-4 months.
The more the software versions age the more users/developers we loose! I am all for only needing to do a full system upgrade about once a year but I still want relatively new software and regular updates. If I wanted old software with large amounts of new hardware headaches I would use SLED.
Since SUSE is supposedly breaking away form direct developer SUSE paid employee support for openSUSE sadly we can also break away form openSUSE being testing platform for SLED/SLES some as well and do some version jumps.
I do not know anyone that is really happy running 3.11.x when 3.15.x is out for general consumption.
For example, I'm running few systems with OpenSuSE 13.1 and only on one of them I installed a newer kernel (because of driver for a sound card I'm experimenting with). As a result, suspend to disk seems completely broken. I see no point in upgrading a kernel on those that work, why should I? Where I want/need new kernel, I have sources to get it; but I'm glad noone is forcing it on me in a regular update. Michal Kubeček -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kernel+owner@opensuse.org